Milton
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2007
- Messages
- 2,360
Is Tom Derderian still at GBTC? What a great coaching record he has.
Disclaimer: I still hold a little bitcoin and bitcoin cash, according to Coinbase my account is worth about $400 as I post this.
I bought $100 of Bitcoin in April 2015. Sold $500 worth @ 17K 12/7/2018, figuring I would have 5X on my "investment" no matter what.
Bought $190 of it 2/6/18 @ 6K, hoping for a bounce at that support level. Got a bounce, but I didn't sell it. Kept it as it appeared (even after falling back down to that level) that $5700 or so was a good support level.
When it broke my support level, I sold almost all of it ($1700) @ the $5500 level. I was going to dump all of it, but wanted to keep a little just to have some to use if desired. In any case, I figured once that longer term support level was gone, look out below (at least for a while).
So now here we are @ just under $4k/BTC. Yet in Sept 2017 it was lower than it is today. That wasn't all that long ago.
One point that people might be missing here: Bitcoin has been a leading indicator (on Steroids) of stock prices. In November 2017, it's boom preceded the Jan equity top.
Maybe Bitcoin is worthless - I dunno. But to say a large scale crash in its price (after such a crazy run off) means that it will be worthless misses other asset classes that have also had a large runoff, a blow off top, a crash, followed by years of misery but eventually coming back. One only needs to look at the Dow Jones average from 1920-1940 to see this, or in terms of more recent history the dot com bubble. Amazon's IPO price in 1997 was $18. It peaked over $100, and fell to under $10 after the bubble burst. And yet here we are with AMZN over $1500 (even with the big recent drop off).
Alarm bells go off when I hear comparison of bitcoin volatility to DJIA. Here is what stuns me: The owner of Overstock.com is getting out of retail to focus on blockchain. I do accept there is value in blockchain technology but the timing seems weird.
Overstock.com plans to sell retail business https://seekingalpha.com/news/3411826
My PETS.com and TOYS.com never did recover though...
At least all of us investors ("investors") get a big fat capital loss carry forward!
No, they didn't. To draw an analogy here, I'd ponder a guess that even if AltCoins go on to great things, many of them (here) will go to zero never to be seen again (like pets.com and many other dot com busts).
So I got a bit of a bash here when I compared Bitcoin to the DJIA (in the great depression) and AMZN (in the dot com bust). I also mentioned Bit Coin crashing as not being a good thing for the equity market.
Here's an article (from today) in Forbes where the author compares it to.....Amazon in the dot com bust and also suggests a coming equity crash: https://www.forbes.com/sites/invest...calates-equity-crash-developing/#363d8ab1c708
Maybe the Forbes author read my post?
The interesting thing about bitcoin is that the underlying technology, block-chain, is itself something of value and may possibly evolve into an industry. But unfortunately it is convoluted with the particular application of block-chains as a cryptocurrency, and it is the latter that most people "invest" in. Cryptocurrency is a fetish investment, you just buy it and hope someone else wants to buy it for more money in the future, but there is no real reason for someone to pay more for it other than a stronger desire to own it. In other words, a fetish.
Last year, my final year of my law school "experiment", there was a younger student with a new kid on the way and every day, he was trading bitcoin (and not paying a lick of attention to the professors) and continually making comments about how it was going nowhere but up. He also bragged with those fantastic gains, his student loans would be paid off a month after graduation. I wonder how he's doing these days?
Like the US dollar. Backed by nothing. Collected simply because others own it and desire it. “A fetish investment.”
Except the USD is backed by the ability to legally tax 330 million of the richest folks on earth.
Actually, not. The Treasury and the Fed have no taxing powers. Methinks you are confounding fiscal policy with monetary policy. All you are guaranteed to get for $1 is $1, regardless of its value in hard assets.
That aside, appealing to the power of government doesn’t work for freedom-loving, government-wary people. The Venezuelan Bolivar is the most recent and extreme example of government gone wrong in the financial sphere. But there are countless others. I spent the early 1980s helping US banks restructure Latin American debt.
Today, US government debt (at all levels) approximates US GNP. Off-balance-sheet liabilities net of assets are at least 2x that. Possibly as much as 10x. Greece, anyone?
If you think it can’t happen here, you’re probably a no-coiner. But if you think about safe havens in faraway lands like New Zealand and Norway, you are probably thinking about gold and BTC, too.
I own none but know a couple of smart people who have invested and have explained a lot to me. As a couple people have indicated above the currency is not so much the thing as is the block chain system. There are many big companies working to utilize the block chain. If the block chain does start to be utilized then, I believe, the premiere block chain currencies will have actual value. I would not write this off like the Beanie Babies quite yet.
So is Bitcoin Amazon or Yahoo or Pets.com? Or are one of the hundreds of altcoins the crypto-Amazon? Or has the one true virtuous altcoin yet to be developed and marketed? Serious questions!
I was almost going to add that to my post! Maybe I have a new career option!Or maybe YOU are the Forbes author!!!!
I did not mention the Treasury or the Fed. Not sure where you go that. The ability to tax rests with congress. The belief that the USD is extended or doomed to failure does not ensure the success of bitcoin. And, if I thought the dollar was doomed, I would buy gold or another hard asset with monetary and intrinsic value. Crypto, in theory, may provide the same hedge against the USD as gold but it does so without the backing of any intrinsic value. Since it has no intrinsic value, it only has value if crypto survives and if bitcoin is the coin of choice (Two very big "ifs".). Both are speculative outcomes. Time will tell. I am short bitcoin all the way down to zero. Even if crypto survives, it will not be bitcoin. But, please don't let me stop anyone from buying in at these bargain levels.
This is interesting. I’ve had similar conversations with other no-coiners, starting about two years ago (when BTC was lower than it is today). They all claim they would short it, but none of them has actually put his money where his mouth is.
Since you claim to be short, how big is your short position? Or is that, ahem, just talk? (I’m long the “JT” option.)
I’m guessing you also think the endowment managers at Harvard, Yale and MIT are all idiots also. Mentioned because they are all long crypto.
Hmmm. Have a good day.
So I got a bit of a bash here when I compared Bitcoin to the DJIA (in the great depression) and AMZN (in the dot com bust). I also mentioned Bit Coin crashing as not being a good thing for the equity market.
Here's an article (from today) in Forbes where the author compares it to.....Amazon in the dot com bust and also suggests a coming equity crash: https://www.forbes.com/sites/invest...calates-equity-crash-developing/#363d8ab1c708
Maybe the Forbes author read my post?
^^Here is the irony in our disagreement. I identify as a libertarian, dislike government fiat currency and feel the banks were propped up to our detriment. I actually would love for a bitcoin type currency to take hold. But, and this is where we disagree, there is nothing that currently makes bitcoin or any other crypto anything but pure speculation. It is not an investment in the classical sense. Therefore, I cannot participate. I do not speculate.
If U.S. dollars are thought to be worthless by the bitcoin community, then why are they taking them in exchange for the valuable bitcoins?